User Generated Content (“UGC”) is content that end-users publish on the Internet, e.g., in the form of blogs, groups, public mailing lists, Q & A services, product reviews, message boards, forums and podcasts, among other types of content. The UGC is available at any number of web locations that allow for users to enter this information. Some web locations are well known UGC-based sites, such as “Wikis” or forums or chat rooms, for example. In utilizing the Internet, UGC is media content that is typically publicly available and produced by end-users, which can be relevant to searching results requested using web-based search engines.
There are existing, but limited, search engines providing searching to UGC-specific web locations. For example, the Google Blog search is a specialized search exclusively on blog data. Another example is Yahoo message board search which specializes on message board data. But these are specialized search engines for UGC-only content.
There are many well-known existing web searching techniques, where these techniques perform searching operations relating to searching general web content, where the general web content does not necessarily include user generated content. Rather, the existing searching techniques typically quantify a more static collection of web-based data at various data locations for the search operations. Based on the exclusion of UGC from search results, the results generated by the existing searching engines are missing relevant information in the results.
Along with the increase in volume of UGC available on the Internet at various web locations, UGC has become a vast collection of rich information. There are a number of queries which classic web searches cannot adequately address. For example, information about digital cameras can be found on respective company websites, but consumer feedback about these products (and services), such as the “zoom freezes sometimes when the flash is on”, comes from the end users themselves. A list of restaurants in San Francisco can be found on the web with a lot of meta-data associated with each restaurant. Opinion queries, however, such as the “best Chinese restaurant”, cannot be answered without involving the users.
Typical ranking mechanisms for ranking of a document in a web search, however, are unsuitable for ranking UGC. UGC are fairly short, they generally do not have links to or from them (rendering the back-link based analysis unhelpful) and spelling mistakes are quite common. Improving search experience for users by leveraging UGC is therefore beneficial.
It thus improves search results to be able to utilize such content, analyze it and to leverage both algorithmic techniques and social interactions to identify relevant information, thereby providing good searches across such content. Accordingly, there exists a need for providing search results that include UGC and for rating the UGC with respect to search results that the search engine generates.